Sixteen dead students and an injured teacher – the terrible toll of a gun rampage at the elite boarding school Schloss Waldenstein. 18-year-old Patrick Sello, who announced his intentions on an Internet forum before the deed, is among the dead: he shot himself before the eyes of his classmates.
At the memorial service, with all its well-meaning speeches, police reporter Maria Grappa begins to doubt the official version of events. Caroline von Fuchs, Patrick’s girlfriend, claims that the injured teacher, Lara Lindenthal, is responsible for the young man’s death. The motive: merciless mobbing by his classmates.
But the teacher can remember nothing, and there were no witnesses to the rampage. The matter is made no easier by school director Wolfgang Lerchenmüller’s stonewalling of the investigation. By chance, Grappa learns that he has a peculiar passion: posing as a school girl in chat rooms. Grappa follows him into the World Wide Web and is suddenly confronted with a world in which only murder is real.